The present invention relates generally to navigation devices and methods and more particularly to a device and method for generating navigation instructions based on electronically retrieved input data.
Many service businesses, such as delivering restaurants, furniture stores, mail order establishments and others, base a high percentage of their sales upon delivery of their services or products to the homes or workplaces of their customers. In most such cases, a customer will telephone the business and place an order for the service or product to be delivered. While this retail practice is highly convenient for the customer, the delivery of the service or product can create numerous inefficiencies that reduce the overall profit to the delivering business.
One such inefficiency arises during the telephonic ordering process. Typically, the customer must orally provide an employee of the business with the customer""s address. This can result in a miscommunication between the customer and the employee resulting in the business recording an inaccurate address and delay in the delivery of the product or service. If instructions for finding the customer""s location are given, this is another opportunity for miscommunication. Assuming the address of the customer is correctly recorded by the employee, the business must often locate the address on a map before dispatching a driver to the address. As can readily be imagined, this problem is particularly acute in large metropolitan areas. Even if the address is successfully located, many delivery drivers struggle with finding the most time- and/or cost-efficient route to the customer""s address, if the driver is successful in reaching the customer""s address at all.
The reverse situation arises when a customer calls an establishment that he or she plans to visit for the first time. The customer calling a restaurant for reservations or a store to inquire about availability of a product often could use reliable and detailed instructions for getting to the restaurant or store.
In other situations, businesses could benefit from improved navigation directions. A business having a central telephone facility for taking orders, for example by use of a toll-free number, may have numerous geographically widespread outlets from which deliveries are made. It would be desirable for the one central location receiving a customer""s call to be able to, first, locate the outlet nearest the customer and, second, send to that outlet detailed directions from the outlet""s location to the point of delivery.
Routing can be particularly difficult when numerous deliveries are to be made in a single trip. In that case, directions should include the most efficient ordering of delivery stops as well as detailed instructions from one stop to the next. Parcel, furniture and appliance deliveries are examples of deliveries in which a truck with numerous articles makes many stops throughout a day. These businesses would benefit from detailed point-to-point directions enabling routing of multiple stops during the course of one trip and back to the beginning point.
Certain information is, in fact, available to the telephone user. If not blocked by the caller, the caller ID service provided by telephone service providers can give the business call recipient the name and phone number of the caller. Also, dedicated telephone lines can be brought into a business for automatic number identification or xe2x80x9cANI.xe2x80x9d In no instance, however, is the recipient of a call afforded the information necessary to route a delivery. Also, navigational systems available for automobiles can give detailed directions from the automobile""s location to a particular address. However, the address to which directions are needed must be input to the system, and the location to which navigational instructions are to be generated are not instructions to the location of a telephone caller.
Software and internet services for locating an individual""s address as well as other information are available. These, however, do not respond automatically to an incoming or outgoing telephone call, nor do they generate navigational information such as detailed directions or maps that assist the user in navigating.
Map generating software is known. A computer user can input points A and B to have a map generated from the one point to the other. Again, the generation of the map is not the function of an incoming phone call, but must have its starting and ending points known to and introduced by the user.
Emergency services, called sometimes enhanced 911, may develop a set of instructions from a particular emergency service station to a caller using name and address supplied by the telephone service provider in the manner of caller ID. The enhanced 911 service is not located at the particular emergency service station. It forwards the detailed directions to the appropriate station, such as ambulance, fire or police location rather than automatically generating a set of instructions based upon the point of location of the incoming call and the point of location of the caller.
In addition to the day-to-day importance to a delivery business of rapid directions generation, these businesses would benefit from a demographics component that allowed analysis of the orders received by telephone. For example, a clustering of orders in one locale coupled with relatively few orders received from another locale could serve as the basis for increased advertising in the region generating fewer calls. Likewise, it would be useful to be able to analyze the types of products ordered in one location as opposed to another, or the dollar amount of orders as it varies from one region to another. Retrieval of a profile of the calling party is useful as well as a history of the party""s previous orders or transactions.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved system for generating accurate instructions that enable optimally efficient navigation to or from a business and that permits use of the information gathered for other business purposes.
In accordance with the present invention, a system and method is disclosed for generating instructions based upon an incoming communication enabling navigation between an origin of the communication and a location or business receiving it.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the system comprises a conventional caller identification unit that reads information transmitted in conjunction with an incoming customer telephone call. A main processor engine receives this information and searches at least one database for a match between the information and the customer""s address. Once the customer""s address is successfully located and retrieved by the main processor engine, the address is communicated to a mapping engine or other software capable of generating such navigational information as textual directions to the caller""s location. The mapping engine searches a mapping database for data associated with the address that may be used by the mapping engine to generate a map between a predetermined point of origin and the address. Once the map is generated, it can then be displayed on a computer screen and/or printed on paper. Textual directions are similarly generated.
Preferably, in plotting a map and/or other detailed directions, the mapping or directions generating engine uses as a point of origin, the location of the installation receiving the incoming call. The map or directions generation may proceed directly from the caller ID or ANI information received with the incoming call by use of a software routine that queries a xe2x80x9cwhite pagesxe2x80x9d type of database to find an address based upon the caller""s name or telephone number as identified by the caller ID feature or by ANI. Preferably, however, the system searches first a database of customers compiled at the site of the incoming call, a delivery business for example. A current address there is used as a destination in map generation. If no current address information is found in the customer database, then the white pages software is resorted to for the generation of a map and/or instructions.
In one embodiment of the invention, a caller""s address is supplied in the caller ID information from the telephone service provider. The systems and method of the invention automatically adopt that information, along with the address of the point of receipt of the incoming call, to generate the map and/or instructions.
In another embodiment, the software of the system chooses a branch or outlet nearest the call-in customer for delivery of an order. (The map or directions routing information is supplied to that particular branch or outlet.)
A further embodiment of this invention, which can be combined with the above-described features, uses reverse telephone directory data to locate the address of an establishment being called by an individual. The system then plots a map to the called location and/or generates detailed directions.
In addition to locating a caller and generating directions to facilitate delivery, an additional feature of the invention includes record keeping to provide a business with easy access to a history of sales. Additional features can include demographic analysis determining the locale where most purchase calls are generated, the particular items sold most in particular geographical regions, the dollar amount of sales to particular regions on a per call basis, and other business information useful for analytical and business planning purposes. Similarly, a history of previous transactions, time of day or day of the week, for previous transactions as well as customer profile information can be brought up and displayed either automatically or upon request of the business establishment.
Where the nature of the business is such that repeat orders are the norm, customer preferences can be brought up and displayed for the use of the operator who takes the order over the telephone. In business-to-business transactions involving product specifications or model numbers typically needed on an ongoing basis by a particular customer, this capability can greatly expedite the ordering process. The customer information and demographic information available in this way can give the small business many of the research and information gathering abilities previously available only to much larger and better capitalized enterprises. In an alternative arrangement, the installation and software that retrieves information such as mapping, directions, customer profile or customer history can be located at a site remote from both the calling and the called telephone. The information retrieval can be centralized in a business with numerous outlets, or the retrieval and delivery of such information can be supplied as a service by a third party such as a telephone service provider.
In still another alternative, a third party such as the telephone service provider retrieves information about a telephone subscriber whose telephone is involved in a call in progress and forwards that to either the calling or the called telephone situs which then uses the forwarded information to retrieve from a database there the complete information desired. An example is a retrieval by the telephone service provider of the latitude and longitude of the site of one of the caller and the call recipient, which latitude and longitude is then supplied to one of the call participants whose computer system uses the coordinates to generate a map and or directions.
Where neither caller ID, which may be blocked, nor the customer database turns up an address for a particular caller, a routine of the program implementing this system chooses an interview screen for display for the call answering operator. This then is completed based on questions put to the caller, the information is logged into the customer database and directions are generated for use in delivery.
The above and further features of the invention will better be understood from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment when taken in consideration with the accompanying drawings.